A Weekday Wildlife Incursion Calls for a Drink
I was so glad to be holding a Negroni when I heard my entire family needed rabies shots
I rarely drink liquor at home.
To be clear, I drink at home— dinner is accompanied by a glass of wine or a beer — and I wouldn’t classify myself as a light drinker. Donald Trump is somehow still the president, so after a long day of sitting in front of a computer and dropping in on The Washington Post’s homepage every two to four hours and having a wee panic attack about the downward spiral of the republic, a few drinks seem to be warranted. (I will discuss this with my therapist, I promise.)
Even still, the liquor shelf remains mostly untouched.
On the evening of Monday, April 8, I was sipping a La Croix. At the time, I was pulling 60-hour workweeks — to give you a sense of my stress level — making it all the more remarkable that I was not drinking.
Of course I am aware that drinking can become a crutch. But some circumstances warrant an immediate cocktail. This was one of them.
People often turn to alcohol during difficult life events or following catastrophes or natural disasters, and I don’t want to make light of drowning out stress with bourbon. Of course I am aware that drinking can become a crutch. But some circumstances warrant an immediate cocktail.
This was one of them.
My husband, Joshua, was at a meeting. I’d put my 13-month-old son, Artie, to bed and resumed working in the office adjacent to his second-floor nursery when I heard our cat, Lola, tearing around the first floor.
Lola is not a super active animal, but she’d recently taken an interest in the deflating balloons scattered around the house after Artie’s first birthday. I huffed downstairs, scooped up the balloons, stabbed them all with kitchen shears, then trudged back upstairs to get back to editing.
Ten minutes later, I heard Lola once again scurrying across the hardwood.
“There is a fucking bird in the house,” I texted to Joshua moments after spotting Lola trying to take down the winged creature figure-eighting between the living room and dining room.
“Ah shit,” he replied. “Walking out. Isolate it as well as you can and I’ll figure it out.”
“I’m just chilling with the door open,” I texted back after I let my oblivious dogs into the backyard. “Lola is doing a piss-poor job of chasing it out.”
It was at this moment that my heretofore useless house cat snatched a bat out of the air and pinned it on the living room rug.
After I sent that text, I shut the door to the first-floor bathroom, where there is a small hatch for Lola to get in and out of the basement, and walked to the liquor hutch in the dining room. I could still hear the bat shrieking a floor below as I pulled bottles of gin, vermouth, and Campari off the shelf.
By the time I began pouring equal parts of each liquid into a glass, the shrieking had ceased.
Joshua arrived home to find me standing over the bottles, gripping the kitchen counter between sips of Negroni. As Joshua suited up to head to the basement and locate the bat, my best friend of 25 years, Mallory, a physician, informed me that my whole family should probably get rabies vaccines. The sips turned into gulps.
I called our pediatrician, who said that because Artie was in a room with the door shut during the whole incident, he would not, blessedly, need to receive a rabies vaccine. Joshua, meantime, was in the basement searching for the bat carcass, shouting, “Goddammit, kitty, where’d you put it?”
An hour later, he came upstairs to report he could not find the bat, dead or alive. We convinced each other the cat had consumed it, and I fixed myself another Negroni.
Exactly one week later, Joshua and I were eating a late dinner while watching television when we heard the hatch to the basement swing shut as Lola came upstairs. She trotted into the dining room and dropped the bat on the floor.
Joshua crouched over the bat, clearly worse for wear but still very much alive, and instructed me to get a large bowl. I grabbed a metal mixing bowl, and Joshua slammed it over the bat. While it shrieked under the dome, we brainstormed as our dinner got cold.
I emptied the contents of a can of decaf coffee — purchased when I was pregnant and abstaining from all the fun beverages — and handed it to Joshua. I fetched him a pair of rubber gloves, then crouched behind the arm of the couch to watch him stuff the bat into the can.
“Wait,” I said as he was about to lift the bowl. “I should close the doors.” He conceded that I was right, and I pulled the pocket doors shut as he gripped the coffee can.
A short struggle ensued, but Joshua was victorious. The following morning, I delivered the still-live bat to the Allegheny County Health Department. Twenty-four hours later, we learned the bat was not rabid, and we felt a little bad about the harrowing last week of its life, being stalked and tortured by a domestic medium-hair before being confined to a coffee can and delivered to the government to be beheaded.
I did not, however, feel bad about my two Monday Negronis. Liquor might not be an everyday drink, but it’s worth maintaining a well-stocked bar for calming the nerves when you have to manage a weeknight wildlife incursion.
The Negroni remains my favorite cocktail, and every time I drink one, I toast to that poor bat.
Annie Saunders, a former copy editor for Heated with Mark Bittman on Medium, is a Pittsburgh-based writer, editor, and researcher.
